Save Yourself, and Don’t Have the Election Night Party

At least 76 million Americans cast ballots as of Monday morning. That potentially represents more than half of all eventual voters who will turn out in the 2024 election, which will end, finally, on November 5.

The early vote numbers tell us people are taking advantage of early voting in the places where it’s available. That’s basically it! There are some interesting nuggets: for example, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, more people seem to have returned to early in-person voting, and so far, 2024’s early vote is not as skewed toward Democrats as it was in 2020. But party registration does not necessarily translate to actual votes, and as election experts will say, we don’t yet know if these are voters who were going to come out on Election Day and are just getting it done earlier, or if this signals a larger turnout pool. 

Some states have reported seemingly juicy voter data – more women voting, which might be good for Kamala Harris; more Republican men voting in Arizona, which might be good for Donald Trump. But these trends won’t be particularly meaningful until after the election, after every American who is going to vote does so. Anyone who claims the early vote is clearly a sign of a Harris or Trump victory probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t be the guy who thinks New Jersey is in play.

New Jersey’s electoral votes may even be called pretty early on election night, as it’s a reliably blue state where a recent Rutgers poll has Harris up by about 20 points. But in the key swing states where many polls show the race is practically tied, it will likely take longer to get the results. 

That means it’s very possible we won’t know who won the presidency until a few days after the election. This will be unpleasant, probably involving desperate social-media scrolling or hours agonizing over returns in a Wisconsin suburb you learned about on CNN an hour ago. But it is not unusual or weird or shady, despite what Donald Trump is almost certainly going to want you to believe. 

This is just vote counting in the era of extremely polarized and impossibly close elections.

It always takes the United States a very long time to count votes. America has a very decentralized electoral system, and procedures and policies vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some states can pre-process votes before Election Day to prepare them to be counted, like verifying signatures on absentee ballots and taking them out of the envelopes. Others, like Pennsylvania, must wait until Election Day to process ballots. There are also those that require mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Day; while in others, the ballots must be postmarked by that date, and have a little grace period to arrive. 

America’s uneven electoral rules were amplified in 2020 because so many states adjusted voting procedures to accommodate for a global pandemic, most notably an unprecedented expansion of vote-by-mail. Mail-in ballots are just more labor-intensive – signatures must be verified, countless envelopes have to be opened – and many states were undertaking this on a huge scale for the first time. 

If an election is close – as it was in 2020, and maybe even more so in 2024 – you just have to count a lot more votes to understand who is likely to win a state. David Becker, the Executive Director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, says to think of our elections like a big bowl of jelly beans, and you need to know if you have more red or more blue jelly beans in that bowl. If you’ve got a bowl that’s 90 percent red jelly beans, it’s probably Alabama, and you can eyeball that and know very confidently your bowl has more red jelly beans. So you can go ahead and call that quickly, before you finish counting each of the jelly beans (though you will count every one). “But if the bowl is 50.1 percent blue and 49.9 percent red, you’re going to need to count every single jelly bean – and you might need to recount it,” Becker said. 

“That’s why California, with very few ballots actually counted, can be reported out on Election Night, right when the polls close,” Becker added. “And that’s why Georgia, who counts ballots as fast as anyone and does a really good job, might not be callable until Wednesday or Thursday, depending upon the margin.”

This is also why we might not know the make-up of the House of Representatives or Senate for a few days if there are a few close races. California’s electoral votes may get called quickly for Harris after the polls close, but the state’s swing House districts might require weeks to determine. 

Yet it’s looking very possible that 2024 results won’t take quite as long as they did in 2020. For one, 2020 was many states’ first rodeo with an avalanche of mail-in votes, and now that a few election cycles have passed, states have gotten better at managing that. And, as surveys suggest, some of those voters may have shifted back to early in-person voting. Plus, Covid-19 pandemic measures like social distancing are out, so more election officials and volunteers will be able to work in tighter spaces with fewer limitations. 

Most notably, some swing states have also made reforms that may speed up counting. For example, Michigan implemented early voting and now allows larger counties to start processing mail-in ballots days before Election Day. North Carolina now requires mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, instead of just being postmarked by that date.

Of course, it all depends on the margins. If the polls are way off, and the race isn’t as close as they suggest, the jelly bean bowls in a place like North Carolina or Wisconsin may be a bit easier to read, and America may have the results sooner. But if the race is razor-tight, the more ballots states will have to count, and the longer we wait for the projected winner. 

In 2020, many more Democrats voted early and with mail-in ballots, and Republicans favored in-person and Election Day voting because Trump lied to people and said vote-by-mail was full of fraud. Especially in states that couldn’t pre-process mail ballots, the result was this “red mirage,” where the GOP looked as if it was ahead because of the Election Day vote, but then, as all those Democratic heavy mail-in votes were counted, a “blue shift” happened, and Joe Biden pulled ahead. Even though this phenomenon was well-predicted, Donald Trump and his allies used it as a basis for fraud allegations – “STOP THE COUNT” and all that. 

America might see similar trends in 2024, though the swings may not be as dramatic as 2020, since the 2024 early vote doesn’t seem as skewed toward Democrats. In some states, we may see many mirages and shifts – Democrats with a big lead, then Republicans way pulling ahead, then back to Democrats, then Republicans creeping up — as different jurisdictions deliver batches of votes.

Which is why America just has to wait for all the ballots to be cast and counted. But for every article like this one telling you to chill out on Election Night, there is a MAGA guy claiming California is about to flip. A vote count is a sign of the system working – election officials doing their jobs, the media seeking to make airtight projects. But the longer it does take, the more misinformation will thrive. That social media will become a cesspool of conspiracies and conjecture is more assured than the outcome of the election right now. It’s already happening. 

Trump and his allies are the main purveyors of this, including one very particular ally who controls an entire social media platform where people get news. Republicans have built an entire infrastructure out of 2020 election denialism, and GOP-aligned groups are already challenging voting procedures. Trump has primed his supporters to believe that if he doesn’t win the election, it is only because of fraud. Trump will certainly challenge the election results if he loses to Harris – honestly, even if he wins, he’ll be sniping about supposed fraud. He tried to overturn an election once, and it seems very likely he is going to at least try again. 

He may not succeed. But it seems pretty likely that even if we know the vote count around Election Day, or a few days after, the results may remain unsettled. Trump and his allies have undermined deep trust in the electoral system among his supporters, but now that it has seeped into the body politic, everyone is susceptible. This 2024 election count will take as long as it takes to get a clear result. That may be faster or slower than expected, but what is less predictable is how long it takes at least one half of America to accept those results.